Just five more minutes

Some moments make people negotiate with time

I find the there’s something very human about the phrase “Please, give me five more minutes.”

We learned to say it as kids, “Please, five more minutes before bed,” or “Please, five more minutes at the park.”

Five more minutes before turning off the movie or getting out of the pool or five more minutes before we had to go back home because the streetlights turned on.

When you’re a kid, you think five minutes is enough time to save the entire evening. You thought five minutes is enough to walk a mile, this might just be me.

And honestly, maybe sometimes it kind of is.

I used to do it all the time when I was a kid. I think we all did.

Especially during the summer when life was a lot more lose. And so were the rules. There was always that moment where the air started cooling off just a tad bit and everyone knew the day was ending, but nobody wanted to admit it at the time.

You could almost feel the nighttime approaching in the way the light turned down it’s saturation as the evening went on, becoming softer and softer each passing minute.

Parents started calling you to come back home as the sound of sprinkles turning on started somewhere down the street.

People were moving slower, bikers were taking their time because nobody was in a hurry no more.

And then someone would say it.

“Just five more minutes.”

Which, as we know, never really meant just five actual minutes. It was a code word you muttered under breath because you weren’t ready to stop the moment.

And that feeling doesn’t just magically disappear as we get older, it changes it shape a little bit, like we do as we grow.

We still ask for five more minutes as adults constantly.

We’ve just gotten better at disguising it as something else. Think about all those times you sit in your parked car after getting home because you’re not quite ready to go inside yet.

We take our time standing between doorframes after saying goodbye three separate times because we want five more minutes.

We stay on the phone after the conversation is technically over and we’ve already said what we needed a long time ago, but we both just let ourselves exist there for a second longer before someone finally says, “Alright, okay, goodnight for real this time.”

We keep refreshing the weather app during vacations hoping the sun would spend the extra five more minutes with us before saying goodnight for real this time.

We hit snooze, we take the longer way home, we rewatch scenes before finishing a movie because the ending feels so sad.

Heck, we even have a five minute snooze on in the mornings.

We’re always trying to stretch moments we love.

And that is no weakness, it’s one of the clearest, and most beautiful signs that being alive is something we hold close to our heart.

Because “five more minutes” is really never about the actual minutes, the extra 300 seconds we’re asking for.

It’s actually about presence.

It’s about wanting to be inside whatever’s going on before time carries it away somewhere else where the only access we have to it is through our memories.

And for me this comes up in normal, ordinary days. Not in the huge milestone moments that we often glorify. No, it’s the small things.

All those dinner tables where nobody gets up right away even after the plates have been sitting there empty for some time now. Or the conversation you had in a driveway that ended up lasting forty extra minutes simply because nobody was ready to get in the car and drive away.

Even the feeling of sitting outside after a really good sunset when the air cools down and mosquitos come out, nobody wants to be the first one to call quits.

People seem to tend to linger when we feel alive. When we’re truly present in the moment.

We live in a time where everything is so optimized towards speed, give me faster replies, faster shipping, faster cooking, faster healing, faster progress… all we seem to aim towards is a faster life, one that we rush through in a hurry.

As if we didn’t like this place?

Meanwhile the real thing we actually want is to stop this… optimization and trying to move through our lives fast.

Just a little more time inside the moment that is currently going on. Not forever either, just… slightly longer. “Five more minutes.”

Maybe that’s why some endings feel so abrupt to us. Like the last warm evening before the season shifts towards the next one. Or when someone hangs up right after saying goodbye instead of lingering for a second in the moment with you.

Sometimes there is a tiny ache that bubbles up from it.

Not because it’s terrible when someone said goodbye and hung up the phone, no. But because humans are kind of weird about transitions.

We don’t move from one moment, or season, or conversation to another very cleanly. We hover in it. We stall. We stand in kitchens for way too long. We look out of windows and ponder about life before leaving rooms. We even hold onto conversations long after they’re finished.

I think part of us is always trying to soften the edge between now and whatever comes next for us.

And honestly, it’s kind of sort of beautiful.

It’s very comforting that people instinctively try to extend the good parts of life, the fun bits. I like that our natural response to joy is not usually trying to become efficient and optimize it.

It’s lingering.

Nobody has ever watched a perfect sunset and thought, “wow, I hope this wraps up quickly so I can get back to answering emails.”

We, people, slow down around beautiful things.
Things that are meaningful for us.

Like staying at the table longer, not only because the spaghetti was out of this world, but because the conversation was what we needed. We walk to home slower because we got nowhere to be and the sky is doing it’s thing, painting everything. We replay stories in our heads that mean something to us.

It’s the same reason we ask for one more or song, or one more episode at night.

They’re not really irresponsible decisions either, we just want to protect these moments from time for a second. For “five more minutes.”

I think this understanding comes to children naturally, before growing up teaches them that you have to rush through everything and become hyper optimized.

A kid at the beach is not worried about productivity, they’re worried about how high of a sand castle can they built. They want to stay in the water until their fingers do that funny wrinkly thing, while the sky turns orange above them.

Until somebody eventually says, “okay, seriously, we have to go now.”

Kids are really good at fully occupying the moment while it’s happening. And we as adults sometimes need to relearn this.

Not all the time, obviously. Life moves and responsibilities matter. You can’t just tell your boss “five more minutes” every time you don’t want to answer an email. Although honestly that would improve morale in some offices.

But still.

I think there’s some level of wisdom in noticing what you keep trying to prolong.

You can tell what matters to people by what they love to linger around with, what they keep delay leaving, what they keep replaying… what they try to stretch slightly longer than necessary.

Because sometimes love does look a lot like standing beside someone’s car for twenty extra minutes talking about absolutely nothing important. And that moment matters.

Heck, sometime happiness looks like sitting on the couch, binge watching your favorite show with your favorite person.

And sometimes being alive looks like staying outside because the air feels so so good and you know summer doesn’t last forever.

Perhaps this is the deeper thing underneath it all, humans know somewhere in themselves that these moments move on, we know this moment passes and we will never have one just like it.

It’s like an unspoken rule between all of us because we don’t speak about it directly.

We feel it in sunsets and vacations and late night conversations over the phone, and the final pages of the books we loved so much. Maybe too much. We feel it in the childhoods that seem to end up overnight, you just become an adult in a blink of an eye.

We also feel it during holidays when everyone stays standing around the kitchen after dessert, slowly eating bite after bite, because nobody’s ready for the evening to be over yet.

But that’s because everything is temporary.
Maybe in our subconscious we know this and time feels heavy.

Which is why we keep bargaining with time.
”Five more minutes.”
We’re not asking for forever, not something permanent, just enough time to feel it fully before it becomes just another thing that passes through.

I’ve started to pay more attention to these passing moments here as of late, those little slivers of time where my instinct is to linger in the moment, instead rush myself to do the next thing.

Just staying outside a few seconds longer and letting conversations breath as they should, getting to watch the sky change colors without immediately reaching for the mobile device to capture it.

Even something simple as sitting in the car after arriving somewhere instead of immediately jumping straight into the next thing.

They’re tiny little pauses in this little life of mine.

Tiny ways of me being in the present, knowing that this moment is running out and moving ahead, but wanting to be inside of it a little bit longer, while it’s here.

And honestly, it’s very healthy, because you’re not resisting time.

You’re appreciating it enough to notice that you want more of it.

Because the desire for “just five more minutes” might be one of the most humans feelings there is.

It means something, this moment, is worth for you to pause and stay in for a little bit longer. And to me, that is real life.

Especially in a world where people rush past so much of their own lives without ever looking up properly.

Yeah, I think that matters.